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Will we be allowed to do anything for boys and men?

Anthony Esolen has recently published a hard-hitting piece on the Catholic priest scandal and its relation to America's growing "boy problem." Esolen argues that American Christians, including Catholics, are too committed already to the feminist agenda to face the urgent need for new, distinctive institutions that cater to boys and that promote healthy male bonding for boys and young men.

Esolen is surely right that there are many Christians who are indifferent to the need for old-fashioned boys' schools and clubs that promote a healthy masculine culture.

But there is an additional question that his article raises: Just how difficult, not only culturally but also financially and even legally, would it be to do what he suggests? More: How difficult is it now to be allowed to do anything effective to help males in America?

Let's face a couple of things that the schools and clubs Esolen suggests would have to do. To begin with, they would have to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. And I do not merely mean sexual practice. I mean orientation per se. And a "don't ask, don't tell" policy would not serve the purpose. I think Esolen's entire article makes it clear that this is so and why it is so. The purpose of such institutions would be the creation of a distinctively male culture free of sexual implications. The idea is that when the young men shower together or engage in physical contact sports, they can do this without any thought or worries about male-male sexual attraction, and they can bond to their leaders without there being any worries or concerns about sexual attraction from the leaders to the young men. Now, this is simply not possible where the leaders are themselves of a homosexual orientation, even if the leaders are honorable men, committed to Church teaching on sexuality, and firmly resolved on celibacy. After all, one can imagine women leaders who were also honorable, committed to Church teaching on sexuality, and firmly resolved on celibacy. But young men shouldn't be showering with them. The whole point of an all-male school with all-male teachers is to get sexual thoughts and feelings (never mind actions) between the people in the school out of the picture so they can concentrate on other, more important things.

How many Catholics would be willing to contribute to a school that was known to discriminate in this way? How many would regard it as unfair, unkind, and unChristian?

Then there is the legal question. Plenty of municipalities and some states make it illegal to discriminate in this way. I know of one local ordinance currently under consideration in my own town that exempts religious institutions only if they are non-profit. Would such a school be non-profit? I suppose so, but that might make its financial woes even greater. And do all states and cities have such exemption clauses? Will they in the future?

An additional financial point concerns government funding. As the Virginia Military Institute case shows, if you accept Caesar's coin, you accept Caesar's conditions, and these include having boys and girls together. It seems beyond question that such a school or club would have to be formed without the slightest dependency on any public monies or benefits, period, even in order to be all-male. And I hate to say this: In my experience, Protestant (specifically, fundamentalist) institutions are better at this than Catholic ones. Catholic institution-formers seem always to be harking back to a day when the state helped out the Church and to be trying to find some way to have the public funding without (they hope, they hope) compromising their principles. In 2009 and later, it would be the sheerest folly to found any religious, conservative school or organization ab initio on such a hope. So the finances would have to be wholly private, making money all the tighter.

Esolen mentions the fact that more girls than boys now go to college and asks if anyone cares. Well, as the mother of three highly intelligent daughters who will, hopefully, be able to be at-home mothers one day, I care a great deal. I have three hypothetical future sons-in-law to think about. I have friends with ten children, eight of whom are daughters. I think they have a reason to care about the "guy shortage" in higher education.

What that guy shortage means is an exacerbation of the problem already in place, wherein a wife finds it easier to get a job than her husband. The situation is humiliating to a man and highly discouraging. It is no wonder that plenty of young men just assume that they will be part of a two-income family and even become at least soft feminists to justify it. Plenty would say outright that they don't like the idea of having the financial responsibility for supporting a family. And who would, especially in today's economy and especially given on-going affirmative action for women? When there are few jobs to be had, it becomes all the more discouraging to remember that one is not a member of a favored group and therefore is at the end of the line as far as getting one of the jobs. There is, and will be increasingly, a vicious cycle whereby young men who want to support their families find that they cannot and, so as not to feel unmanly all their lives, come to conclude that it isn't important at all and that their wives owe it to the family to work ad infinitum, perhaps should even feel privileged to have the opportunity to do so. This in turn increases the assumption that women support the family or that, at least, the job is always halved, and feminism becomes stronger still in society, making it harder and harder for men to find jobs.

And if fewer men than women have college educations, this will make it all the less likely that men will be able to get jobs, especially in competition with college-educated young women.

So, yes, I'm concerned about the fact that there are fewer guys in college. So what do we do about it? We're certainly not going to be able to get the colleges to aim recruitment efforts specifically at boys. They would probably think it illegal, even though they can do the same vis a vis girls while the government smiles benignly.

What about the job problem? Well, I've often thought in recent years that conservatives should have job-finding services. And if there are such already, we should have more. And traditional conservatives and social conservatives should have sub-niches within these. And to make it better still, such job services should be specifically aimed at helping conservative males find jobs.

Oops. No can do. I assume that any such arrangement, if made formal, would run afoul of federal and state non-discrimination laws in a heartbeat, would it not? If e-Harmony can be pistol-whipped by threat of lawsuit into offering dating services for homosexuals, when there isn't even any federal law against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, I'm sure no job service would be able to be aimed in any specific way at helping men. There is a federal law against discrimination on the basis of sex.

All of which sounds very depressing. It seems to me that we conservatives have not perhaps quite heard the sounds of doors slamming behind us these past forty-odd years. Something needs to be done about the boy problem, but there is a whole legal and social labyrinth to be traversed already if anything practical and effective is to be done, and the labyrinth will become only more complicated, I predict, as the years go on, especially with a Democrat-controlled Congress and an Democrat administration.

I therefore suggest a coalition of rich conservatives and conservative lawyers to start brain-storming and drafting plans immediately for institutions, services, and organizations to help boys and men. There is no time to be lost.

Comments (50)

Interesting. I wonder if this decline in boys/young men's institution ccorrelates with an increase in gang membership? On the job front, the gutting of our manufacturing base has put additional pressure on what were traditionally decent blue collar jobs held by men. In addition, the emphasis both in job creation and in desirability/esteem has been on white collar jobs for so long, I don't see how it can make a comeback.

You may be right about decline in blue-collar jobs not reversing, and that certainly is an issue if young men are not going to college. However, there is no good reason why they should be going to college in fewer numbers than girls. There is no reason why the whit-collar shift in American jobs should favor girls per se. Let's be blunt: It is simply baloney, as hundreds of years of human history attest, to think or imagine that young men are as a group less academically gifted than young women! Far, far from it. Something else is clearly going on. I suspect a combination of factors, including perhaps young men's being disgusted by the thought of on-going attempted brain-washing and PC-whipping in college.

It used to be that you would have bright, even _brilliant_, young men who seemed not to be living up to their potential in high school but who got a move on around about 18 years of age when they were challenged and inspired with something they found really interesting academically and also when they felt freed from what they perceived as the stifling classroom and social atmosphere of high school. Apparently this dynamic is no longer happening as a young-adult corrective for the feminized K-12 classroom. Why not? I suspect another factor is the fear that they won't be able to get jobs out of college after all. Perhaps young men succumb more readily to despair or discouragement than young women, _especially_ (and this is important) when all the high school guidance counselors probably hold that one of their major raisons d'etre is to encourage girls qua girls to go to college and "be all that they can be."

It may have something to do with the collapse of college from a place where one was educated to a place where one is merely credentialed. This collapse took place within a single human lifetime and by now is almost complete.

My father may have belonged to the last generation of graduate students (Ph.D., Georgetown, 1968) who were expected to be real scholars; he needed Latin, Greek and a modern language merely to be eligible for his doctoral program. A bachelor's degree used to carry much more prestige than a Ph.D. does today. (I live in the Washington DC area, which has one of the highest per-capita populations of Ph.Ds in the country, and most of the "doctors" I have met are almost completely ignorant of everything except whatever little subdivisonal sliver of nothing their dissertaions were about -- "Homosexual Behavior in the U.S. Navy in the 1840s" or some such.) The kids who are coming out of colleges today by the droves (and I mean the mainstream, not the exceptional students) are ignorant, ill-read and PC-indoctrinated. They have been there only to get that ticket punched, to get the credential that will allow them to get that plum job. That's the plan, anyway.

This stark contrast between a college education that actually produced an educated person, and the kind that today merely provides a credential, as necessary today as a high school diploma used to be, is the product of educational trends going back for decades, trends which privileged BS educational theories over real, solid scholarship.

Teenage boys know BS when they smell it. They know a con when they see it.

There is a method and ideology behind this. I am convinced that feminists who make up the majority of the mandarins in the education apparatus are determined to run the fellas out, anything that even hints of masculinity gets into their sights. I am astounded how such a relatively small group, judging their views against the American mainstream, could have stood education from K through PhD on its head with nothing more than token resistance.

I saw this first hand at VMI - I was a cadet when the effort began to get women admitted to the school (but fortunately graduated before it came to pass). We had a series of visits from some group, Association of American College Women or something like that, can't remember, who would begin the legal fight to admit women. I remember seeing them and their absolute contempt for everything we were about - they hated military service, the military, our history in particular as a Southern military institution, and the virtues we held dear, courage, honor, duty. I have no doubt that they were pushing this in order to subvert the school as much as possible, in the hope that the presence of women would weaken the things that made VMI what it was.

GKC, I think you have a good point. And interestingly, your point echoes a point made in a very different context: Rudolf Flesch's discussion (circa 1960-something originally) of why boys more often were designated as being "problem readers" than girls. Flesch's hypothesis was that the whole-word method of teaching reading which he opposed was so boring that boys were more likely than girls simply to opt out.

I think the corrective dynamic I described whereby bored high school boys became excellent college and grad-school scholars required that they be exposed to real scholarship--to something real--and be excited by it. No more BS, as it were. No more playing around. This was the big leagues. It was a challenge. Just going through four more years of playing the game in order to be given a slot in society is not going to inspire the bright-but-bored-and-lazy 18-year-old to get off his duff and work.

Steve K., that is a sobering and impressive point. I'm very glad you told that story.

And what's really terrifying is that, without courage, honor, and duty, not to mention objective truth, linear reasoning, and all those other "sexist" values the feminist hates, our country is doomed. So feminism is ultimately a suicidal ideology.

I recently saw "The Magnificent Seven" again after many years, and was startled to see how simply and strongly the film extols manly virtues: courage, loyalty, honesty, self-sacrifice, loving fatherhood. And these are all presented in an explictly masculine context, one in which you could never, never, ever, make a movie today.

"The Magnificent Seven" is almost fifty years old.

Yet, the young male co-workers I showed it to, men in their late twenties, had a profound reaction to it. They'd never seen it (imagine that) and they were practically in tears over it. I suggest this is because it says to them, "This is how you are called to be: brave, loyal, disciplined, generous; and some of the best ways you can be these things are now shut off to you, and what's more, you live in a time and place that ridicules them." Of course, we still value these virtues, but publicly we value them only in a feminine way. Think Lifetime movies. "I Won't Leave Without My Daughter," that kind of thing.

What some of this suggests is that one way to attract young men to college is to make college more what it ought to be. If we tell prospective students that they will be challenged academically at a particular school, and then fulfill that promise, of course (!), men may be attracted to that school. And all the more so if the school offers a strong education in "hard-core" areas like physics and engineering.

I'm inclined to agree with you about the practical difficulties, in our society, of helping boys become psychically and spiritually healthy men. I also have much else to say about all what Christina Hoff Sommers, and now Tony Esolen, have called "the boy problem," and will do so shortly in a post of my own. Here I shall confine myself to one point.

I think it's inevitable, in the rather near future, that women will hold the majority of managerial and professional jobs in our society. That means that, save for married women with small children—most of whom should be full-time mothers and do paid jobs only part-time if at all—the average woman will enjoy greater wealth and social status than the average man. I don't think that development is worth railing against. But it calls for a long and painful period of adjustment by both sexes that has barely begun.

The modern West has created socio-economic conditions which have rendered much of the evolutionary division of labor between men and women obsolete. Most women need no longer be confined to the homestead and don't really want to be; most men need no longer hunt for food or physically defend the family and tribe from enemies, and don't really want to. But most women still prefer to marry men with equal or greater wealth and/or status than they; and most men still define their worth in terms of the wealth and/or status they can achieve through healthy competition. The reproductive division of labor has not disappeared either, nor should it. All this creates a serious problem. What's needed is a deeper appreciation of both femininity and masculinity that will allow females and males to develop a healthy complementarity; Anglophone feminism retards that appreciation because it defines equality as the absence of difference. Hence the problem for boys of finding ways of achieving healthy manhood that do not depend on winning a competition for wealth and power: thanks to feminism, our institutional and economic arrangements overcompensate for the evils of a "patriarchy" that no longer exists. If that doesn't change, our society is indeed doomed as you suggest; for it will be overrun with men who feel they have nothing invested, precisely as men, in the new order. So how can it change?

I can only speak of my own case as a man and of what I've observed as a teacher of young people. As for myself, most of the women I've been involved with, including my two wives, either earned more money than I or had better earning prospects than I. That's because what interests me professionally just doesn't pay very much. The money-and-status issue was never a problem for me, because my self-esteem never depended on those things; I've always been more about spiritual and intellectual matters. And my difficulties with women, including my two divorces, weren't really about money and social status. My case, and that of several other men I know, shows that the ever-increasing wealth and status of women need not, in itself, be the problem. The problem is that our residual, socially recognized models of masculinity are too limited and superficial. Although some will, most boys will not be outstanding athletes, soldiers, hunters, mechanics, business owners, and so forth. So a lot of boys, in my experience, just don't know how to become men of respect, and hence do not apply themselves to doing so. Few people seem even to recognize anymore that any boy has to become a man by strenuous, initiatory activities with men to a degree that doesn't hold for girls with women.

The only sort of solution I can think of is to make spiritual as well as temporal "quests" a mark of manhood again. Our society has almost completely lost any sense of what that even means. But it must be recovered, and it's going to have to involve some "de-feminizing" of ecclesial and academic culture. Only that will enable boys to stop "playing" at life and become heads of households without having to rely, for their position and self-esteem, on having greater wealth or professional status than their wives. For in future, they'll have less of that than their wives on average. Perhaps this development is the Spirit's way of reconfiguring the concrete expression of the great nuptial mystery of God's relationship with his people.

That means that, save for married women with small children—most of whom should be full-time mothers and do paid jobs only part-time if at all—the average woman will enjoy greater wealth and social status than the average man. I don't think that development is worth railing against.

Well, I have to say: I do. Think it worth railing against. For a number of reasons. I would start with the fact that I believe children, not just small children, are best off with a full-time mom. This is all the more important when the collapse of our educational establishment is taken into account with the corresponding desirability of home schooling. Now, it's interesting that the above couple of sentences combine the "is" and the "should be." Let's face it: If we're talking about the effects of feminism, then even married women with small children _are not_ full-time moms and don't have the opportunity to be, and the feminists would like it if even fewer of them were. Maybe the feminists might allow it for the first year or two of a child's life, but I hope that you would define "small" so that it goes up a little older than "eighteen months to two years." Besides, if there is more than one child, then we could be talking about quite a few years out of a woman's professional life even on the European "two years off" model, and feminists are not really happy with that. That's why they'd like women to stick with one child. So already, you appear to be willing to challenge the feminist status quo to some extent.

Now, once we challenge the feminist status quo, then we might as well be willing to be more radical. The traditional division of child-rearing was exceedingly healthy for everyone involved, not least because it avoided precisely the conundrum you are discussing of having to _invent_ some way for men to _feel_ like they are family leaders, manly, and important, even though the wife is the real career powerhouse of the family. If we recognize a need for full-time parenting for longer than a couple of years, and if we recognize the natural devolvement of that full-time focus upon the children upon the mother, so that we are talking not about androgynous "parenting" but about _motherhood_, then the husband is going to have to bring home the bacon or there will be no, or very little, bacon.

It is my opinion that in the absence of perverse affirmative action incentives and feminist ideology men would naturally be selected for more professional jobs than women, even without the need for physical strength. Even in corporate culture, it adds stresses to have the sexes mixed, all the more so if the women have a chip on their shoulder and/or are taking off more time because they are trying to balance their maternal instincts with their careers. Businesses used to be allowed to take those factors into account as matters of legitimate business interest. Now they would probably feel guilty for doing so and would be legally punished in any event. But what that means is not that the absence of physical strength in white-collar jobs renders the differences between the sexes irrelevant. It means that we are being forced, or are forcing ourselves, to ignore relevant differences. Stubborn differences between the sexes persist in various intellectual fields, and this is what keeps the feminists wailing and whining. God forbid there should still, still, be more male than female philosophers, physicists, engineers, and so forth. In math and philosophy, I know, a wholesale attack upon the very integrity of the disciplines has been undertaken to make more space for women. "Math education" has now become a hot cottage industry so that women can be hired and advanced in math departments without having to do the hard-core stuff that used to be necessary. Philosophy departments are frankly advised to advertise in feminist philosophy *so that* they can hire women. And so forth. Again, what this demonstrates is that it just is not true that non-physical areas tend to flatten the differences between the sexes. Even in those areas, the differences have to be positively bulldozed away.

So I rail, because I believe that the integrity of much that is worthwhile is going under as a result of the female domination you predict. Your prediction is indeed plausible, but I'm sure as heck not going to go gently into that good night, and that for the sake of the virtues of the disciplines, for the sake of my girls and, God willing, for many other intelligent future home schooling mothers.

One of the standard fields for men to excel as masculine endeavor was the opening up of new frontiers. Space, anyone? Does anyone doubt that a viable (commercial as well as in other ways) development of space would, at the start, attract and enliven MEN much more than women? I think a real space effort by government, industry, and science, would be a great start.

This stark contrast between a college education that actually produced an educated person, and the kind that today merely provides a credential, as necessary today as a high school diploma used to be, is the product of educational trends going back for decades, trends which privileged BS educational theories over real, solid scholarship.

Exactly. Colleges have simply become glorified trade schools for the most part. Used to be you learned things like accounting, marketing, business management, etc. by doing it as an apprentice (and I would wager, you learned it better that way). Even law is something much better learned by doing under the wing of an experienced practitioner than through a sterile book and classroom. I'd wager some of the science and engineering would be the same. But I doubt it will change - essentially, the college trade school allows employers to foist the cost of training onto the employee.

The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter runs an all-boys prep school in Pennsylvania called St. Gregory's Academy. Privately run, of course, but thriving; the boys play rugby, excel in academics, and some prepare for the priesthood. It's where I'll be sending my son in about 10 years' time.

Steven's insight is the most valuable. What we've witnessed in the last forty-some-odd years is an unprecedented cultural assassination. This isn't about providing women with opportunities or educations: St. Thomas More's daughters spoke several languages fluently, for Pete's sake. This is about what sort of society we are going to live in; it's about history, culture, and power. Not simply the distribution of power between men and women (any sensible man will tell you that even the most patriarchal society is full of enormously powerful women), but the distribution of power between people who are, for lack of a better word, sane, and those who are not. And it is high time that people men stand up and say, "pardon us, ma'am, but we'd like our civilization back, please."

And all the more so if the school offers a strong education in "hard-core" areas like physics and engineering.

People often think that women are more inclined, or perhaps more apt, at social sciences than hard sciences. This assertion, I think, overlooks part of the problem. Such "softer" sciences, like law (I'm thinking especially of the law here), have been substantially softened in recent decades because of the influences of women. Even sensible, well-intentioned women view the concepts involved in legal problems differently from men. The vast increase in the number of women in the legal profession and on the bench has by itself changed the content of the profession's subject, even where overt agenda displays itself (and there has been PLENTY of overt agenda, both within the profession and in the law's use for other purposes---see the discussion of VMI, above).

I have nothing much to add to Lydia's great post there, but Dr. Liccione if you believe that soon, women will dominate the upper professional and academic echelons of our society and will on average possess greater wealth and status than men, how do you propose to achieve this idea you state a few paragraphs on:

"But it must be recovered, and it's going to have to involve some "de-feminizing" of ecclesial and academic culture.

I don't think what you think is inevitable will come to pass, or will for long, because I don't think the present arrangements are anything like sustainable, but that is a subject for a later comment when I am not goofing off from work...

The traditional division of child-rearing was exceedingly healthy for everyone involved, not least because it avoided precisely the conundrum you are discussing of having to _invent_ some way for men to _feel_ like they are family leaders, manly, and important, even though the wife is the real career powerhouse of the family. If we recognize a need for full-time parenting for longer than a couple of years, and if we recognize the natural devolvement of that full-time focus upon the children upon the mother, so that we are talking not about androgynous "parenting" but about _motherhood_, then the husband is going to have to bring home the bacon or there will be no, or very little, bacon.

Nowadays, that model works for some families, but by no means for all; in today's world, to expect it to work for anything close all is a pipe dream.

In view of that, I don't believe we have to "invent" some way for men to "feel" like they are "family leaders" etc. Such ways already exist; they just aren't valued enough. For one thing, some men are better parents and/or teachers than some women and shouldn't be thought of as shirking their duties if they function as the main caregivers or homeschool teachers. For another, men need to be the active spiritual leaders of their families, which is nearly the opposite of what is now generally the case when there is any spiritual leadership at all. We are just going to have to let go of the idea that the only acceptable model of leadership for husbands and fathers involves the role of chief "provider." In some cases it does involve that, to be sure; but it is no longer possible or desirable that it be presumed to do so.

Given my own interests and temperament, e.g., I never felt able or willing to fulfill the role of chief provider, but I never felt or was made to feel any less masculine for that. My own "initiation" into manhood partly involved sports and mainly involved successful completion of a long, grueling course of academic training among (mostly) highly competitive and articulate males. It had nothing to do with money or jobs. The mistake I made was that it took me too long to realize what spiritual leadership means. I had wanted to be a priest when young but could never arouse the interest of the males in charge of that fellowship of males; so I concluded that I was unsuited for spiritual leadership. Authentic male spirituality is mainly what's lacking for most men today; I see that even at Catholic conferences for "men's" spirituality, where what's done and recommended could almost invariably apply just as well to women.

The problem is that our residual, socially recognized models of masculinity are too limited and superficial. Although some will, most boys will not be outstanding athletes, soldiers, hunters, mechanics, business owners, and so forth. So a lot of boys, in my experience, just don't know how to become men of respect, and hence do not apply themselves to doing so.

Bull's Feathers. Nothing about our "residual, socially recognized models of masculinity" requires that men work as mechanics or even own a business. Masculinity has always provided ample room for scholars and clerks---not to mention a world's worth of other blue jobs. What masculinity doesn't permit is shirking, being weak-spined or mealy-mouthed, or justifying mediocrity in one's life by arguing that being a wimp is really just A-OK. Masculinity does require, however, that the scholar, clerk, athlete, or whomever not be one-dimensional. The scholar should be able to ride a horse or split firewood. The clerk should be able to handle a firearm. The athlete should know something about Homer Aquinas. The modern world has made being well-rounded in this manner more difficult, but it certainly hasn't made it impractical or pointlessly old-fashioned. The entire concept is revolting progressivism of the worst sort. Unless we're talking about mechanical devices or women's fashion, things do not become unnecessary or dysfunctional simply through the passage of time. The idea is a myth, like the unicorn; except unlike unicorns it is a pernicious and destructive one that has been used to get us into the very mess in which we find ourselves.

We do not need some innovative notion of masculinity. We need men who don't peddle nonsense.

Authentic male spirituality is mainly what's lacking for most men today

As much as I take umbrage with the previously quoted sentiment, this one is quite true. The complete decline of masculine spirituality and the exodus of masculine religious role models has been devastating. Fathers and husbands do need to exercise their paternal offices in guiding the religious life of their families. It is true that too many, both in the US and especially abroad, do not. But in many ways this is part and parcel of the larger crisis of manhood.

Also, it bears observing that visible vestiges of masculinity have been distorted by cultural pressures. Feminists often point to sex crimes, schoolyard bullying, and "jock" culture as embodiments of masculinity, and thus as vindication of their opposition to it. These, however, are merely poor caricatures of full, vibrant masculinity that values character and gentlemanly conduct right alongside personal accomplishment. It's the very feminist pressures themselves that have left these perverse tatters as the only visible remnants of masculinity.

This is an interesting discussion, and quite portentous, though in the end I must come down on Lydia's side of the feminism question, albeit with a qualification that might not be accepted.

The present predicament of boys is the product of the confluence of trends which began as separate streams of influence, became symbiotic, and eventually virtually fused, becoming inseparable. While strands of influence could be parsed ever more finely, to such an extent that analysis would bring us to a standstill with its sheer complexity, it is worthwhile to take a broader perspective, since we are dealing with broad-based social phenomena. One of those strands of influence is the strain of liberationist sentiment in the modern West, the notion that the progress of history must bring with it, indeed is constituted by, the movement of the individual from his or her tutelage to traditional forms and restraints; this is a comprehensive impulse, and not one confined merely to sexual and moral traditions narrowly construed. It encompasses the ambition and drive of the titan of industry whose actions result in the obliteration of settled patterns of living, indeed, of entire communities and ways of life. Critical for the predicament of boys in American society, however, is the feminism that is now integral with the cultural politics of the post-Marxist left, the left that remains after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the (partial) disillusionment with the socialist vision; such leftism now strives mightily to achieve proportional (and probably more than proportional) representation of all historically marginalized groups within the system they once sought to transform structurally. In a sense, this is the leftist inflection of the Pink Police State idea that James Poulos has banged on about for some time, only in the leftist variety, the left will surrender the bulk of its utopian economic visions for a politics of symbolic/representative inclusion; by renouncing much of the ambition of abolishing capitalism (whatever that is taken to mean), they secure for themselves a social space within which various cultural radicalisms can be freely indulged. In another sense, this incorporation of the marginalized into the system is itself a liberation; following the logic of liberalism since Mill, such inclusion is liberating because it provides not only the imprimatur of society upon the formally marginal, but because such inclusion supplies the material means by which the individual is enabled to fashion herself a life, to determine for herself the meaning of life and the mystery of the universe. Self-creation, in a phrase, requires money. And, as is well-rehearsed among conservatives, this left has achieved hegemonic status within most of the universities.

The second strand, perhaps paradoxically considering the above, is comprised of the structural changes that have been wrought upon the American economy over the past forty years. Those structural changes, by facilitating the deindustrialization of America and the concomitant financialization of the economy, which is to say, its increasing concentration in the hands of Wall Street, have inflicted upon the boys and men of the nation a sort of pincer movement. From above, the economic establishment outsources the manufacturing employment that once stood as the bedrock of identity for a majority of American men, whether employed in enterprises small or great; from below, that same establishment, expanding its strategies of arbitrage, imports vast hordes of foreign labourers, across the spectrum of professions. Men, even apart from the introduction of cultural leftism and feminist nostrums, would be downwardly mobile across a number of indices. But there is a wrinkle here: not all men would be downwardly mobile, just the majority of them. To grasp this, one need only consider, for a few brief, terrifying moments, the claque of banksters and pols, unified as a class by the numerous revolving doors between their professions, who, in their pursuit of ever more exotic forms of usury and expropriation, effectively engineered the present Great Recession. Virtually all of them were men. As virtually every observer of the Street can attest, the culture of the place is testosterone-laden, hypermasculine and competitive; the Taleb-distribution compensation schemes are nothing if not excessively masculine in this sense: I'm more a man because I booked X billion more in nominal value this year, and my yacht is bigger, etc. In the recent Icelandic collapse, virtually the only bank to escape the financial destruction wrought upon that nation by its biggest banks, which effectively turned the nation into a hedge fund, was the one run by women. However, the Street is not a place for the average Joe, as witness the importance of quants and other sorcerers of finance capitalism. The Street is a place for the cognitive elite, for highly-competitive, narcissistic men possessed of IQs at least a standard deviation above the norm, who will then proceed, by means of a thousand strategies, to strip from the society many of the opportunities left to their cognitive inferiors. What remains is increasingly the softer sort of cubicle employment that ends up being much more attractive to women, now encouraged by feminism to enter the workforce, than to men. It's a perfect storm for men either lacking the endowments requisite to Wall Street work, or uninterested in that sort of thing.

So, Michael is correct that the manifest trendline of our society is towards having the majority of the middle-management and professional jobs filled by women. The upper echelons will continue to dominated by men, for reasons that Larry Summers expressed, to his personal detriment. But the notion that women can be conditioned, whether by society or religion, to accept marriage to men who are, by the principal measurement of worth accepted in a democratic society, money - as noted since at least Tocqueville's time - is fanciful, being utterly contrary to the evolutionary psychology of the feminine sex. The overwhelming majority of women, being of average intelligence, and thus limited in their capacity and inclination to reflect upon the deeper teleologies of human nature, will never be content to chafe under the disjunction of public authority and domestic male headship, as evidence, I believe, by the fact that the overwhelming majority of divorces in America are initiated by women, and for utterly spurious causes. A profound and almost-inarticulable unease will manifest itself as innumerable particular discontents with men, and such women will forever be searching for an indefinable something that will impart to them a sense of fulfillment. Women of above-average intelligence will be more likely to separate their evaluations of personal worth, in themselves and others, from career and wealth, but this is of no great consequence in the aggregate, since we are talking about small minorities of the population. Men, on the other hand, could adapt, to one degree or another, provided that certain conditions, at home, and in society as a whole, obtain. Political economy and culture are annihilating those conditions.

If we do not push back against feminism, or if we cannot, the attempt being futile, and if we do not strive to reconstruct something of our political economy to ensure than men can secure for themselves and their families a dignified mode of existence, then all discussion of the predicament of boys will be as a sounding gong, signifying nothing. We cannot war against human nature, only the circumstances in which that nature expresses itself.

I agree with everything you said about the range of acceptable male career roles and about being "well-rounded." It describes what ought to be the case but too often is not. So I think you've misunderstood me. What I've been trying to suggest is that the key to healthy masculinity these days is less about what sort of paid job a man has than about spiritual leadership both within and outside of the family. Exercising such leadership is fully compatible with a man's making less money than his wife or being the chief caregiver of the children. But most people of both sexes don't see that because they have little idea what spiritual leadership is and why that is more important than any particular temporal role.

The overwhelming majority of women, being of average intelligence, and thus limited in their capacity and inclination to reflect upon the deeper teleologies of human nature, will never be content to chafe under the disjunction of public authority and domestic male headship, as evidence, I believe, by the fact that the overwhelming majority of divorces in America are initiated by women, and for utterly spurious causes.

Jeff:

I agree. The authority of the state now works assiduously to destroy male headship in the family. And the devastation of men by the family-law system—in terms of how domestic-violence law is applied, criteria for custody assignment, and child support—has as much to do with how divorces are completed as with their initiation. Millions of men have been ejected from their homes, stripped of their assets, and forced to the margins of their children's lives against their will. Most of that is caused by the poisonous conjunction of old-fashioned chivalry and newfangled feminism. The whole phenomenon must be eliminated if any progress is to be made in relations between the sexes.

Excellent comment, Maximos. However, I will complete the line of thought you began here:

If we do not push back against feminism, or if we cannot, the attempt being futile, and if we do not strive to reconstruct something of our political economy to ensure than men can secure for themselves and their families a dignified mode of existence, then all discussion of the predicament of boys will be as a sounding gong, signifying nothing.

The question begged is this: what happens if the traditional Christian resistance against feminism proves ineffective? I'll tell you what happens: a resurgent barbarian masculinity. Feminism is unsustainable and will not last. It will either be replaced by traditional Christian patriarchy, or it will be replaced by a harsh, brutal, pagan masculinity which takes no prisoners. Think Genghis Khan. We see the beginning of this already, with "extreme" sports, "shock jocks", male revenge fantasy films, and even the election of men like Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger to high public office. Your description of the men of Wall Street, I believe, is another indicator. The stakes are higher than we realize.

Maximos, I think the reason that you are saying that men in the aggregate will be more downwardly mobile than women given the loss of manufacturing jobs is because men will be unmotivated (bored, in fact) by the soft-cubicle jobs that are available to those who are not ultra-intelligent and hyper-aggressive, but women will be more willing to take those jobs. Is that accurate? It's an interesting thesis, but I'm not entirely sure it's correct. I've known too many guys who would like a good job with benefits even if not overwhelmingly interesting but who have trouble finding one. But it seems to me that they are having trouble finding them _in part_ because of affirmative action and aggressive political correctness, and if they give up and don't get the college credential, it will become even harder.

Mike, I cannot agree with the tacit connection you seem to be making between a clerkish or bookish inclination and the absence of an ability to support a family. In the United States, an academic job is one of the best jobs one can have. Not only does it carry prestige, more importantly, there is the possibility of tenure--a form of job security not available even to men who make a lot more in yearly salary than the average associate professor. Certainly, a person of bookish inclination is not thereby debarred from supporting his family. Far from it. To be sure, academic jobs are not among the highest paying, but they are steady, tend to be resistant to recessions, have good benefits, allow more flex time than many other jobs, and usually pay enough, at least, for a family to live on, especially if they are willing to be careful. So I really have to challenge this tacit dichotomy between macho male, high-powered finance, and ability to support a family on the one hand and mild-mannered academic type guy with no macho pretensions on the other hand. The latter sort have often, throughout at least the last hundred years, been more successful in the long run than the former!

Moreover, Mike, I don't understand why you don't consider the male provider model even to be _desirable_. I could understand better a "that's not how it is, deal with it" harsh pragmatism. But you expressly say,

In some cases it does involve that, to be sure; but it is no longer possible or desirable that it be presumed to do so.

It's the "or desirable" part I don't get. Look, there is nothing shrug-worthy about a man's being a provider. It shouldn't just be thought of as some sort of regrettable focus on "worldly" priorities (e.g., money and prestige) which Christians should "rise above." I think we can see this better if we think of it in terms of protecting the wife and children from poverty. Perhaps another way to think of it would be in terms of this stark question: What if the wife gets pregnant? Women are of childbearing years for a long time. If one has simply accepted for one's family the image of the wife as provider and does not even consider it _desirable_ that that be changed, when the lady gets pregnant, things get a little hairy. Inevitably, the natural, God-given connection between mother and child has to be downplayed to some extent or another. The lady has to work her family-supporting job up until the last possible moment, or the family won't be supported. It's not as though Mr. Mom can suddenly slip into a convenient phone booth and turn into Super-Provider overnight when the pregnancy test comes back positive. Right away, this sort of pressure is de-feminizing and a denial of nature. Then, she must get back to work as soon as possible afterwards, perhaps after only a three-month break, unless in the meanwhile the husband has been able to scramble around enough to find a job and reverse their roles. So we get into "Mom pumps breast milk overnight so she can go back to her provider role in the morning while Dad gives the breast milk in a bottle." Or maybe formula, which is fine. I'm no breast-feeding fanatic. But the point is that we then have a tiny baby who is being chiefly cared for by his father, along with his brothers and sisters, through thick and thin and everything else, while Mom wears the economic pants and brings home the bacon. And meanwhile, where does the pressure fall for protecting the family against poverty? On her. And where does the weight fall for nurturing, cuddling the infant, cleaning, etc., etc.? On him. Are these natural roles? I'm sorry, but no. They are not. And there is nothing undesirably pushy or macho or self-absorbed about a man who would rather not have such a complete switcheroo of gender roles on the domestic scene.

Am I saying that that can never work out pretty much okay? No, I'm not saying that. But I am saying that it is _desirable_ that it should be able to be otherwise and that it is _highly undesirable_ that that should be our most common social model of the family.

Lydia, in case my argument was not made sufficiently explicit, it is that the majority of men will be downwardly mobile, not merely because many will find cubicle work unstimulating and degrading, though many will, while women, on the other hand, will relish the interpersonal connections that come with it, but also because they will be pushed out by feminism and affirmative action, and punched by the impact of immigration upon their wages. Men increasingly confront an intensifying competition for crap, emasculating jobs, most of which require formal credentials, the acquisition of which necessitates running the PC gauntlet. The intersection of cultural leftism and globalization/financialization has created this set of circumstances.

I knew my views would be somewhat controversial around here, but I don't think there's as much disagreement as you or others seem to think.

Am I saying that that can never work out pretty much okay? No, I'm not saying that. But I am saying that it is _desirable_ that it should be able to be otherwise and that it is _highly undesirable_ that that should be our most common social model of the family.

I agree it would be undesirable to make the "Mr Mom" role the "most common" model of the family. Given the inheritance of "nature" alone, that will probably never happen anyhow. My claim is, I should think, rather modest: it's no longer desirable that men be globally presumed to be the chief income-earners, because the economic realities of contemporary life, well described by Jeff, are going to set couples up for needless disappointment if they all operate on that presumption.

Wives and mothers capable of earning much more than their husbands, who are becoming quite common, are unlikely to be happy campers if they cut a huge temporal hole in their careers to be a full-time homemakers while their less-capable husbands function as the sole provider. The only way to avoid unhappiness in such a situation is for the couple to share authentic spiritual values which take precedence over their desire for material prosperity, and for the man to exercise spiritual headship in the context of such shared values.

Look, I know a number of couples who operate on the traditional division of labor. Some of the women are happy with that; but some are not, for the reason I've given. I also know a number of couples who operate on less-traditional models: either they both work but she makes more money, or he makes none at all and cares for the children. Most of those couples seem quite happy. They know that, given the realities they confront, that's what works best for them. But just as important, the man is the spiritual leader in every case.

Certainly, a person of bookish inclination is not thereby debarred from supporting his family. Far from it. To be sure, academic jobs are not among the highest paying, but they are steady, tend to be resistant to recessions, have good benefits, allow more flex time than many other jobs, and usually pay enough, at least, for a family to live on, especially if they are willing to be careful. So I really have to challenge this tacit dichotomy between macho male, high-powered finance, and ability to support a family on the one hand and mild-mannered academic type guy with no macho pretensions on the other hand. The latter sort have often, throughout at least the last hundred years, been more successful in the long run than the former!

All that is true; but what happens when the academic male doesn't get tenure or has to deal with a family crisis that interrupts his academic career? The latter happened to me during my first marriage even before I even had a chance to come up for tenure. I've been struggling ever since. Now I rarely have disposable income because I must pay support for the children of my second marriage, which I did not want to end. There aren't many women around my age who find an underemployed academic attractive; but if I were twenty years younger, it would be a rather different story; I've observed what happens with younger couples. Attitudes have evolved, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

I did miss your discussion of masculine spirituality when I posted my initial response. And I will agree that making $X is not the sine qua non of appropriate masculinity. But because proper masculinity is multidimensional, the spiritual and physical elements have to go hand in hand. If a man's wife makes more money than he does, well, that could be alright, but he'd better be doing some quite serious masculine stuff in other regards. Chiefly, he ought not to live in such a way so as to place the onus on his wife of always having to work that job.

It will either be replaced by traditional Christian patriarchy, or it will be replaced by a harsh, brutal, pagan masculinity which takes no prisoners.

As ugly as barbarians are, they are VASTLY preferable to the status quo. Barbarism is largely a blank slate; it doesn't have an agenda, it doesn't have a lot of powerful cultural institutions to support it. It just has people and some unsavory practices. It can be civilized, Christianized. A good amount of what we cherish about Western society (apart from the Greco-Roman elements) is the product of baptized barbarism, overlaying the Church on the uncivilized practices of Goths and Angles.

If neo-barbarism is like being overrun by Goths, feminism is like being overrun by Mohammedans. They have an agenda, they have powerful institutions, and they are motivated not simply by some vague desire to be in charge or destroy things. They are motivated by a near-religious zeal to eradicate the existing society. Compare Assyria and Italy 500 years after their respective conquests: where would you rather live?

The whole point of an all-male school with all-male teachers is to get sexual thoughts and feelings (never mind actions) between the people in the school out of the picture so they can concentrate on other, more important things.

So they can concentrate on other, more important things?

As if simply the absence of girls in such a school will not ignite the flames for them -- especially in the adolescent male; if anything, such repression as this will only intensify the impending flames!

Aristocles, I don't think the _presence_ of girls is so very helpful for quenching any flames. Let's assume that even in a mixed-sex school, at least if it is a Christian one, the guys and girls are not going to be sent off to get it out of their systems and let nature take its course! Not that that quenches any flames, anyway, as we see in our sex-obsessed anything-goes secular high schools. No, I think you are just mistaken. Being able to stare at a pretty girl fellow student across the aisle or do a joint science project with her just doesn't, I strongly suspect, help a young man to keep his sexual impulses under control. It's not as though the young men in such a boys' school are old enough in our society to be getting married and following St. Paul's recommendation for flame quenching.

The fact of the matter is, as even your own comments indicated, folks continue to think that if girls were absent from the scholastic institution, that guys would inevitably be able to concentrate primarily on their studies and other grand tasks; however, such a futile attempt as that has often only resulted in remarkable repression even to the point where you find guys in such private institutions (as well as females in theirs) making extreme attempts at meeting members of the opposite sex in other facilities beyond that very academic institution.

Indeed, these students often engage in notoriously more lascivious and deplorably perverted acts with their opposite counterparts than those who simply attend a co-ed institution.

it's no longer desirable that men be globally presumed to be the chief income-earners, because the economic realities of contemporary life, well described by Jeff, are going to set couples up for needless disappointment if they all operate on that presumption.

Point taken. I would say, though, that "presumed" has a lot of different aspects and meanings. For example, there is such a thing as making it a fairly high priority to try to bring about that model in one's family if at all possible, and aiming for it from the earliest point in one's marriage. In other words, viewing it as normal and the contrary as undesirable, being willing to do things like relocating or taking a cut in income, pinching pennies, and so forth, if that is what it takes to let the mother stay home with the children, or _at least_ to cut back to part-time work while the father works full-time, so that the maternal role can be fulfilled to the greatest extent possible. I think the real difference between us is that you don't like that picture--of people trying really hard to change things or make things work as often as possible--both societally and in individual families--in that direction.

Wives and mothers capable of earning much more than their husbands, who are becoming quite common, are unlikely to be happy campers if they cut a huge temporal hole in their careers to be a full-time homemakers while their less-capable husbands function as the sole provider.

I think that's a very large overstatement. Probably we move in different circles. I know women who probably could earn as much or more, if not always much more, than their husbands, who are perfectly happy not to do so. Or, if they have now made it "too late" to do so by forswearing a career, who could have taken a very different path in life many years ago. One of them has her PhD in physics while her husband has only an MA in chemistry. The life of a housewife in America in 2009 is an incredibly good one. I know even more women who are supporting their husbands through school or during economic down-times and can't wait to be done, even if they could go on earning more than he for the rest of their lives. And we aren't just dealing with my anecdotes. Plenty of books have been written about the torn-in-two career woman with the sick child or the little baby at home or, worse, in daycare, who wishes she could be with him. Part of the issue here is that phrase "their careers." I know more women, probably, than you do who simply do not think of themselves as _having_ careers, even if they could have very well-paying ones if they wanted to. They may have jobs to make ends meet, but that's a different matter. Not having started out with the category "my career" as a major part of their lives, they have no stake in getting tied up in knots over the sad fate of "cutting a huge hole" in this entity, the female career.

There aren't many women around my age who find an underemployed academic attractive; but if I were twenty years younger, it would be a rather different story; I've observed what happens with younger couples. Attitudes have evolved, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

Perhaps I should leave this comment unanswered, but since it involves an explicit statement that you don't think the evolution of attitudes a bad thing, I will say something about it: Harsh hearing though it makes, I do not think it is at all unreasonable for a woman to want the man she marries to have a job.

My claim is, I should think, rather modest: it's no longer desirable that men be globally presumed to be the chief income-earners, because the economic realities of contemporary life, well described by Jeff, are going to set couples up for needless disappointment if they all operate on that presumption.

Holy testerone, Mike, snap out of it! That sounds like feminism by other means, as in abdication, and it is unacceptable as a social model beyond a very small subset of the population. Exercising spiritual leadership requires physical, mental and emotional sacrifice, or a man will be tuned out by his wife and kids. Few women will want to hear our take on the Gospels if we're waiting with a with soccer moms and Mr. Moms at the school bus stop. Nor should they. The overwhelming majority of women I know don't want to be the breadwinner, spiritual leader and physical protector in the relationship. I work with women from Ivy League schools who are typically between the ages of 24-32, intelligent, very attractive, ambitous, and desperate for a restoration of the traditional male. I say we give it to them, by raising, teaching and mentoring men.

The above commentary on male downward mobility is correct, and has to be arrested, not accepted. I have no solutions on a grand scale, other than, men get busy and make more men, the social trends and economic conditions be damned!

In the area of education, I can only partially agree that boys will go towards an education that is challenging. Perhaps the most challenging fields for education are in the sciences, but males, who should see a challenge in these fields are leaving at such a rate that there will soon be more foreign graduate science students than domestic graduate students in the sciences and the undergraduate population has only just started to stabilize after falling precipitously. Even in computer science, a traditional male bastion, male students are losing population.

When I was an undergraduate, we had one women in the entire (hard) science classes. We tended to treat her as a cherished little sister in terms of respect and as an equal in terms of subject matter (physical processes and chemical reactions rarely care if the hand pouring the solution is male or female). In other words, we had respect for the person as both a woman and as a scientist - but the science always came first.

If women want to be equal, that is one thing. If they want to dominate, that is another. Women dominate by stealth. Men dominate by confrontation. In a women-dominant culture, men are raised contrary to their nature.

That being said, education has been dumbed-down today not because of the feminist movement, primarily, but because of the more general entitlement movement (of which feminism is a submovement) as well as the rise of passive modes of communication. When I was in graduate school, to get a doctorate, one had to pass two foreign language exams, but by the time I was ready to graduate, the requirement had been relaxed to only one because the students could not handle the work. Now, students cannot (or do not) memorize as they once did. Study after study has demonstrated that the current generation has less internalized facts than any generation in the history of the United States. They are used to looking up everything online and the education community panders to this. It used to be common knowledge how many feet were in a mile and yet, none of my beginning science students can answer the question. In many ways, students today resemble people who have temporal lobe brain damage. They need tape recorders to remember what they were just doing and they need not just a structured environment, but a micro-managed one. They simply cannot do things for themselves. Such self-reliance had been bred out of them. This is not a result of feminization - women can be very organize - but of the passiveness of modern education. The do-it-yourself industry has all but tanked. It used to be a right-of-passage for a boy to build a radio. Now, one can't even find the parts. Forget trying to find a chemistry set with anything other than baking soda.

True independent thinking require hard work and preparation. Shooting from the hip does not. Modern students are trained to make snap judgments that support the status quo. This may be one reason why men and women, alike, are leaving the sciences: they are afraid of the truth. They want to create the truth. they want to own and control truth. What they don't want is to become a slave to the truth. Their own created identity, their mask, is more important than discovering who they really are and what the world is really all about.

I am very pessimistic about what I see. Men are not just simply becoming less masculine. Women are not just simply becoming less feminine. They are both becoming less able to distinguish the truth. No wonder they don't know who they should be.

I hate to say this, but if you want boys to be boys and men to be men, then start by tell the child and educational psychologists to shut up. They distract from truth when they start talking about self-esteem. Their talk is all rubish. Even gang members have self-esteem, even if they derive it from how many other gang members they've killed. Boys and girls should have culture, tradition, respect, loyally, inquisiveness, friendship, truthfulness and other moral foundations established by education so that a genuine self-esteem may then be earned, not granted. These psychologists seem to forget that the only esteem that really means anything is an esteem based on the truth and on performance within that truth - otherwise, what is there to esteem? To esteem means to be above the rest, not equal. St. Paul counseled people that just as the prize in a race goes to only one man, just so in the spiritual life, one ought to run so as to win. No saint every became a saint by having self-esteem. They became a saint by working for God's esteem.

Oh, and if you want to fix the problem, after banishing the psychologists, get rid of the divorce lawyers. If there were no easy way out of a marriage, if people were forced to understand, going in, that this relationship was till death, either the murder rate would soar, or people would have to learn to order the relationship so that it worked. Natural law will take care of that, if psychologists and lawyers are gone. Men will reclaim their manhood and women their womanhood.

In many ways, the whole problem, here, is the intersection of the pseudo-science of psychological insight (which partially spawned, along with the post- WWII youth movement, the entitlement movement) and the loss of the sacred.

I hate to say this, but if you want boys to be boys and men to be men, then start by tell the child and educational psychologists to shut up.

Mr. Chicken, I don't know how much across-the-board you and I would have about various issues, but the crowd is going wild here with approval of that sentence alone. I detest education pseudo-scholars about as much as it is possible to do. A degree in education should be considered a disqualification from ever holding any teaching job, from what I've seen.

As ugly as barbarians are, they are VASTLY preferable to the status quo.

This, Paul, I am not prepared to concede. (Not at the moment, anyway, but do check back with me tomorrow.) The average man under Genghis Khan's despotism wasn't worth any more than the average man under Feminism. And the average woman, of course, was at best just another concubine. It isn't for nothing that Dr. Warren Carrol of Christendom College dubs Khan "the most evil man who ever lived".

Feminism, on the other hand, is a kind of Christian heresy, so with the feminists I sometimes try to entertain the possibility of finding common ground. "The devil you know" and all that.

Circumstances beyond our control forced me to have to support our family financially from the time our fourth child was just over 1, while my husband stayed home. God has been gracious to allow me to teach that which I love (writing and literature) and to give me a significant ministry to the young women (and some of the young men) whom I teach. But even though we did not choose this arrangement, it has had negative consequences. It has been very difficult on my husband in terms of his self-evaluation not to support us (and yes, he is the spiritual leader of our home and pursues "manly" labor in maintaining and improving our house); we only had the children involved in homeschool activities with other families when I could be spared to take them (or it was father/son) because what man wants to go hang out with the other moms; I have ached every day of my life since I started working for the time and energy to give to my children as everything in me calls me to do; and our children have had struggles that I believe are directly related to that circumstance, even though it wasn't chosen and we have tried to accept it.

When our fifth was born, it nearly killed me to start back to work (he was born during Christmas break, and I did get to work half-time the spring semester). I had to work full-time up to the break (two weeks before he was born) and I fought all-day "morning" sickness every single day. But I had to be there and do my work, no matter how much I needed rest. (Come to think of it, I haven't felt rested again since right about that time . . .)

I have a Ph.D. (two degrees more than my husband would ever have earned under any circumstances -- but you should see him work with his hands!): I could probably have made a real "career" of academia if I'd put my mind to it -- but I chose to have my summers for my family (and to renew my energy as much as possible) and to teach in Christian higher ed where scholarship isn't required for tenure so that I didn't have to be pulled in even more directions than I am anyway. I would have given anything to have been home with my own children instead of teaching other people's.

One particular thing I've experienced: I could NEVER leave home at home. I am always aware at some level of my family: what is going in the various children's lives, their tensions and anticipations, any tensions with my husband; . . . And when I am at home, I can't leave work at work -- well, no teacher ever does, but I mean the relationships -- who said what and who argued over what with whom and what needs to be done to create harmony and how can I possibly reach that recalcitrant young man on the back row . . . This does not seem to be so much of a problem for men, as far as I can see; they compartmentalize these areas of life better so that they can BE at home when they are home, and at work when they are at work, and not partially in both places at once, mentally and emotionally.

Don't try to analyze my particular situation, please, as none of you know us. (In other words, please don't tell me how we could have run our lives differently or become satisfied and fulfilled in our circumstances. Other people have had other experiences; good, but they aren't us.) I simply offer this much as anecdotal evidence of how difficult the situation *can* be, even for believers who trust the Lord with their lives and who haven't chosen to reverse roles but had it thrust upon them -- building on what Lydia's said above.

It is one thing to have the situation thrust upon you, your husband and your family, and quite another to say that it is an inevitable accomodation we'll have to make due to the social conditioners in the schools and media, and our post-industrial economic paradigm. Besides, your husband is obviously heroic, or he wouldn't be the spiritual leader of your family. Yet, it is also clear, you don't think your situation should become normative.

This does not seem to be so much of a problem for men, as far as I can see; they compartmentalize these areas of life better so that they can BE at home when they are home, and at work when they are at work, and not partially in both places at once, mentally and emotionally.

I think you are absolutely right about that, Beth. It squares with all of my experience. I would be a nervous wreck in an academic department and would take much harder the various work "things" that my husband is able to leave behind him when he comes home. I think your experience does support what I have said about difficulties and normativity and does tend to refute the idea that if a woman is capable of making a better living than her husband she would be _unhappy_ putting her career on hold. You are another example to the contrary.

(This comment is directed to the original post, I hope I have time to read and engage with comments later)

Lydia writes:
"Plenty of municipalities and some states make it illegal to discriminate in this way... I assume that any such arrangement, if made formal, would run afoul of federal and state non-discrimination laws in a heartbeat, would it not? If e-Harmony can be pistol-whipped by threat of lawsuit into offering dating services for homosexuals, when there isn't even any federal law against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, I'm sure no job service would be able to be aimed in any specific way at helping men."

While such concerns probably have a chilling effect, smaller organizations can be happily oblivious to such laws unless they attract activist attention.

If the laws are getting in the way of what men need, then the solution is another male tradition: the secret society. Call it the Brotherhood of Indifference to Lawsuits.

As for Esolen's piece, I thought it worthy. He suggested how feminist misandry enables the sexual abuse of boys, but he was too subtle in showing the vices of our age as an attack on fatherhood itself (The sexist language debate is an attack on the revealed fatherhood of God, on God the Father Himself).

Daniel Amneus wrote a book called _The Garbage Generation_, something of a "masculinist" work that at times runs into contemptible woman-hating. (A traditionalist woman or the Touchstone writers should take a look at it when they're bored of criticizing tiresome feminists.)

Yet Amneus has insight. Reacting to the myth of a pre-historic matriarchy, he charges that patriarchy is coterminous with civilization. (Replace one word with another in a feminist tract, see what happens)

Take a look at the world of inner cities. Matriarchy takes hold in a society of vagrant and irresponsible men.

While some anti-feminists, like feminists themselves, see women's lib as female self-assertion, Amneus sees it as the male abdication of responsibility.

After all, feminism could not have taken hold without the male establishment's collaboration. Men and women were not jealous enough of their sons' duties and privileges. Each altar girl takes the place of a boy, yet no one objects.

Esolen's essay and many others like it appeal to the language of victimhood. But that's no way to get men to step up. What man wants to recognize himself as an unwilling victim?

Rather, men need to recognize that they are being suborned to shirk their male duties in preserving society. Only men can rebuke and contain caddishness without sounding like shrews, and yet they are accomplices in their own moral emasculation and societal decline.

A man will chafe both when called a victim and when called a coward. Only the latter really has moral content and the promise of fruitful effect.

Right, Kevin. One does what one must in a broken world. But choosing the situation we've been in for convenience or a higher standard of living instead of actual need . . . We live nicely on one salary (not much in a private Christian college, but plenty if one is just a bit careful), but I'd have gladly lived with much, much less had he been able to provide it. I encourage our young women here to seriously consider that the world may be telling them a lie about "needing" to work for pay outside the home for "fulfillment" . . . It's wonderful to hear from the ones who take this seriously and find that they love home.

Thanks for the confirmation, Lydia; again, one does what one must -- but every once in a while it is well nigh impossible to walk into a classroom and do my job . . . or not to rehearse all the work stuff over and over at home and just enjoy my family . . . I believe in God's sovereignty and I know He has given the grace for our lives -- and I'm grateful for His showing me some of the fruit of my work -- but I'd have much rather just stayed home and taught my *own* kids and maybe even have had time for other things I love to do -- I laugh when people ask me, "but what would you DO all day if you were home?" Are you kidding me?! Let's see, sew, write, cook real meals, write, embroider, write, teach Sunday School, write, volunteer at the Crisis Pregnancy Center, write . . . :-)

Kevin Jones -- You might enjoy reading more of Tony's work, both at Mere Comments and in the Touchstone Journal itself. He has addressed most of what you say somewhere or other, and doesn't encourage a victim mentality in men. Many of his essays are precisely a call to men to help each other BE men. In fact, he's often set off a firestorm of anger from women commenters who think he goes way too far with it . . . :)

We're certainly not going to be able to get the colleges to aim recruitment efforts specifically at boys.

I'm not so sure about that. Some of the bean counters of Diversity in higher education are in fact concerned and some colleges apparently do give men some preference. See this reprint of a Chronicle of Higher Education article, "The New Gender Divide":

Perseus, I only had time to skim the article, but I must admit to being skeptical about, for example, adding football teams to attract boys. Anybody writing for the Chronicle of Higher Ed knows about Title IX. The feds aren't letting colleges in general add football teams to attract boys. To the contrary, gender parity in numbers of students on sports teams is being mandated as a condition of receiving federal funds, leading to the shutting down of varsity male teams of various kinds all over the country. As for "primary colors" in the student brochures, well, one commentator said it well above: Boys know BS, and they don't like it. And that's about as ersatz a way of attracting young men as I ever heard of. I think a number of commentators above were definitely on to something about the way that the general decline of the quality of higher ed has de-motivated more young men than young women as far as going through the four years and all the expense. There's a lot of sense in that, it seems to me.

Kevin Jones says,

If the laws are getting in the way of what men need, then the solution is another male tradition: the secret society. Call it the Brotherhood of Indifference to Lawsuits.

Amen. Go for it, brother!! Of course I won't know if you do, in the nature of the case, but I wish you and anyone who tries it all the success in the world. And if your secret society is so successful that it has jobs for men going begging, be sure to e-mail me, because I'm sure I will know then, as I do now, men looking for jobs. If you get in touch in six-seven years, I may have a future son-in-law in mind.

I agree with you, too, about the victimhood issue, and I was worried about that w.r.t. the main post. I even thought about adding an update about that but wasn't sure what to say. I don't want to misrepresent Esolen, there. The fault of rhetoric is probably mine. It seems to me that here is the truth: Men have indeed been given the shaft through feminist engineering which has resulted in many truly and seriously unjust job, scholarship, and other decisions. The anecdotes are legion. And the public schools are places to which it would be nigh-unto child abuse to send any boy, perhaps even more than any girl. But this doesn't mean that what we need is to think of men as some sort of new victim class or interest group. What we're asking for certainly isn't some sort of crooning, PC bean-counting or special treatment.

We do need, however, to remove the injustices or, at a minimum, to find a way to circumvent them. It's not much use saying, "Pull up your socks and be willing to take responsibility" to an exceedingly well-qualified recent philosophy PhD grad with a wife who would like to start having babies when he has just been turned down for a job in favor of a much less well-qualified female candidate. His socks were very well pulled-up at the interview, his publication record is good, he's worked his rear off and done all the right things. Now what? So there are real issues here, and I fully admit to not being sure of the best way to address them in the present social and legal context, especially when I want to avoid sounding like I'm looking to start or encourage some sort of narrow, victimhood men's movement.

Lydia: The more significant way is affirmative action in admissions, which one admissions officer admitted occurs (and that's what I hear from sources at my alma mater as well):

"Unfortunately, her test scores and grade point average placed her in the middle of our pool. We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write "admit" next to her name.
Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants."

LOL....My 8 y/o daughter complained on the way home from Mass this morning (after watching her older brother assist with both Benediction and Mass)that SHE wants to be an alter server. This mama had a good a laugh and said "oh no honey!!! We need too many good priests for you to alter serve" When she asked what I meant, I told there are plenty of ways for girls and women to serve the Church with out stepping on the boys toes.

The problem here is cultural. I don't mean simply that the wider culture has embraced the enemy's ideas. I mean that the survivors, those who sympathize with Lydia's point, don't have any means of preserving the former worthwhile culture. We don't know who each other are, we don't know where each other live, and trying to find each other often involves saying the sorts of things that get you fired.

But promoting virtues requires a culture, it requires a society---it requires real-world interaction with other people who believe in the same principles as you do. So we really do need some sort of society or network (although not a "secret society," per se, they being verboten under Canon Law) that both links traditional-minded people in geographic communities and resists infiltration by the thought police. Something broader than going to your local Latin Mass but much narrower than Facebook. Calling someone with imagination and computer skills!

The average man under Genghis Khan's despotism wasn't worth any more than the average man under Feminism.

OK, true, being ruled by Mongols was terrible, and they did rule much of Russia for a terribly long time. I suppose I wasn't thinking of Mongols. Is neo-barbarianism more Visigoth or more Mongol?

The neo-barbarians Jeff was talking about are like Mongols. He was thinking of thuggish, violent, terrifying males. And I think he has a point. With the death of the strong but gentle male Christian ideal, we may be left with a sort of masculine version of Elois and Morlocks--either the gangsta with scars on his shaven head or emasculated or PC-whipped men.

The one thing I can't beleive has not been mentioned is pornography and sexual promiscuity. Boys used to be motivated by the need to marry well. That was motivated by an unfulfilled sexual desire. Women used to be the prize that men competed for. Now they are just a vice. It is much more difficult for a boy to get drunk than to get a sexual release. The taboos are all gone. It is just to easy.

The male sex drive starts purely physical and develops into a desire for an emotional and spiritual relationship with a woman. But the physical needs to be hard to get. When it is men will re-orient their entire life to pursue it. That is a good thing. It does not happen anymore.

There is also to matter of women not looking for a man who is going to be a good a provider. They don't want a protector. It is not clear what they want. So even if a man wants to change his life to impress a potential mate he could be very confused as to what that would look like.

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